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Best place to buy a decent gaming PC?

anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular

I'm talking about places I can go to like Best Buy. I'm not interested in ordering online or building my own. I basically just want to buy a decent PC somewhere that I can play SWTOR on. I don't want to spend more than 600 dollars. Any help would be appreciated.

Do you need a monitor? If not, you can get this system at Best Buy that would be your least-bad option for gaming.

The other option would be to buy a cheaper system (like around $500) and add a cheap video card to it. Pretty much anything sold these days has enough CPU and RAM to run any game decently, but the graphics on low-end systems usually lag behind.

If you need a monitor, then the best you're looking at is something like this, which won't really be adequate for gaming of any kind without a graphics upgrade, even a low-intensity game like SWTOR.

a5ehren on February 2012

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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular

Do you need a monitor? If not, you can get this system at Best Buy that would be your least-bad option for gaming.

The other option would be to buy a cheaper system (like around $500) and add a cheap video card to it. Pretty much anything sold these days has enough CPU and RAM to run any game decently, but the graphics on low-end systems usually lag behind.

If you need a monitor, then the best you're looking at is something like this, which won't really be adequate for gaming of any kind without a graphics upgrade, even a low-intensity game like SWTOR.

Thanks for the input. That first choice has this: AMD Radeon HD 6550D graphics. Is this any good? Or is it like integrated?

Also if I do buy something cheaper with integrated graphics, can I still install my own graphics card or will it be locked or something since integrated cards are built into the motherboard? Also, I have a monitor I plan to use.

The two problems with adding your own card are that you might need a new power supply and if the computer you bought has a slim case then a bigger might not fit.

Also, last I checked the prices BB charged for cards was pretty outrageous.

Integrated graphics should be overridden by a video card with no problem.

But really, trying to buy a computer for gaming at BB is just a terrible idea. One possibility is to look for computers with AMD's LLano chips like the one a5ehren linked to. Their integrated GPU is much better than Intel's.

you won't find a local brick-and-mortar store selling gaming desktops anymore outside of Best Buy. CompUSA and Computer City self destructed. Frys are decent, but you'd be lucky if there's one in your area.

Do you need a monitor? If not, you can get this system at Best Buy that would be your least-bad option for gaming.

The other option would be to buy a cheaper system (like around $500) and add a cheap video card to it. Pretty much anything sold these days has enough CPU and RAM to run any game decently, but the graphics on low-end systems usually lag behind.

If you need a monitor, then the best you're looking at is something like this, which won't really be adequate for gaming of any kind without a graphics upgrade, even a low-intensity game like SWTOR.

Thanks for the input. That first choice has this: AMD Radeon HD 6550D graphics. Is this any good? Or is it like integrated?

Also if I do buy something cheaper with integrated graphics, can I still install my own graphics card or will it be locked or something since integrated cards are built into the motherboard? Also, I have a monitor I plan to use.

The Radeon 6550D is integrated, but it is actually usable (unlike the Intel graphics) for stuff like SWTOR as long as you don't expect to play on maximum settings.

The two problems with adding your own card are that you might need a new power supply and if the computer you bought has a slim case then a bigger might not fit.

True, but any cards in the sub-$100 range should run just fine on the power provided by the PCIe slot, and these prebuilt systems usually have a high enough overhead for that. The second concern is very much valid, though. OP would need to come back here and ask us for some recommendations (and give us some measurements).

you won't find a local brick-and-mortar store selling gaming desktops anymore outside of Best Buy. CompUSA and Computer City self destructed. Frys are decent, but you'd be lucky if there's one in your area.

The cheapest system I could build from any of those that matches the A8 system I linked earlier was $589 (and it was...another A8 system with no external graphics). These guys don't really cater to the low-end because there isn't any money there.